Parsing a date string containing a timezone using joda-time

Question

I'm trying to parse a date string using joda time and unfortunately I can't find a way to parse the timezone.

Here my latest attempt:

String s = "2013-09-20 13:23:50 Etc/GMT";
DateTimeFormat.forPattern("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss ZZZ").parseDateTime(s)

results in

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Invalid format: "2013-09-20 13:23:50 Etc/GMT" is malformed at "Etc/GMT"

Where is the error in my pattern?

Which time zone is `Etc/GMT`? I know `GMT` but what is `Etc`? — Aaron Digulla, Oct 01 '13 at 15:52
Wich version of `joda-time` are you using? I tried your example (with version 2.3) and it is executing successfully! — M. Abbas, Oct 01 '13 at 15:59
@AaronDigulla It's a Posix thing see also here http://stackoverflow.com/a/4009126/817385 — Zounadire, Oct 01 '13 at 16:01
@AaronDigulla it's in the docs http://joda-time.sourceforge.net/timezones.html — Ben Thurley, Oct 01 '13 at 16:01
:-/ Then it should work. `zzz` will not work: "Time zone names ('z') cannot be parsed." ((docs)[http://joda-time.sourceforge.net/apidocs/org/joda/time/format/DateTimeFormat.html]). So `ZZZ` should be the correct pattern. Odd. Can you try with 2.2? Maybe it's a bug (but I doubt it). — Aaron Digulla, Oct 01 '13 at 16:07
@AaronDigulla hmm downloaded 2.2 but the result is the same... I hate stuff like this. Probably a minor thing you can only miss :/. — Zounadire, Oct 01 '13 at 16:26
Create a unit test and step through the code with a debugger. Or look at the code and try to find out where it tries to parse time zones and write a unit test for that to see what happens. — Aaron Digulla, Oct 02 '13 at 07:34

Ilya · Accepted Answer · 2013-10-02T20:03:38.143

4

You should use Joda-Time library with version 2.0 or later.
This feature was added in version 2.
See release notes 1.6 -> 2.0.

Allow 'Z' and 'ZZ' in format patterns to parse 'Z' as '+00:00' [2827359]

Support parsing of date-time zone IDs like Europe/London

Support parsing of date-time zone names like "EST" and "British Summer Time" These names are not unique, so the new API methods on the builder require you to pass in a map listing all the names you want to be able to parse. The existing method is unaltered and does not permit parsing.

edited Oct 02 '13 at 20:03

answered Oct 02 '13 at 19:56

Ilya

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Turns out my original problem was a nasty classpath problem, that caused an older version of joda time to be used. Thanks for the tip Ilya that pointed me to the right solution. – Zounadire Aug 27 '14 at 08:42

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 14 '14 at 16:20

To parse datetime string with time zone you can use next for [Java]:

new DateTimeFormatterBuilder()
      // z is timezone name
      .appendPattern("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss z") 
      // special map to map names to time zones
      .appendTimeZoneName(new HashMap() {{
          put("UTC", DateTimeZone.UTC);
      }}) 
      .toParser

or [Scala]

new DateTimeFormatterBuilder()
      .appendPattern("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss z")
      .appendTimeZoneName(Map("UTC" -> DateTimeZone.UTC))
      .toParser

Parsing a date string containing a timezone using joda-time

2 Answers2